The utter vacuum and meaningless emptiness at the very heart of our existence is disconcerting, dissonant and it is in general the last thing that anyone wants to hear about or acknowledge. From those brief few years we may each be lucky enough to experience, we seek and weave what little meaning and purpose we…
Logical Games: Golf is not (just) Golf
One of the most unrelentingly tedious dimensions of human social existence is that of a polite and receptive silence in the presence of utterly uninteresting conversations or narrative recollections. Listening to an enthusiastic account of a round of golf, for instance - and acknowledging the diversity of personal interests, hobbies and sporting professions which exist…
Climate Strike: Which Economy?
I observed a characteristically parochial performance from a politician on the morning news today. The topic of the Global Climate Strike was under analysis and the tired old excuses for workers and schoolchildren not attending the rallies and protests were wobbled around with rhetorical ineptitude. An argument was made for the importance of a strong…
Organisational Inertia
Entrenched resistance to mature and well-informed organisational metamorphosis and (useful) new ideas is simultaneously: a concise characterisation of (the) fear of novelty, difference and change; the essential pattern and shape of (pretty much every historical instance of) organisational, political and ideological pathology; a reflection of core psychological symmetries and reflexive boundaries through which self- (or…
That which we love, kills us.
That which we love, kills us. This thread of life and passing narrative or musical improvisation that we all embody - it is a self-propagating pattern of information and energy. We find ourselves serendipitously located at a point of resonance or systemic sweet spot of scale and complexity at which sentience and intelligence has invoked…
Philosophy of Creative Writing: Say What You Mean
There is a filter and limit imposed on thought by language and its associated cognitive grammars. The burbling brooks of pure energy and sentient quicksilver in my mind are always just out of reach. Every beautiful concept fades back into the buzz and entropy of ideas and information or energy much faster than I can…
The March of the Immaterial Abstractions
A patterned liquid probability and abstract symmetry of information flow. The form and flow of this life and logical information space we inhabit is as much a matter of what we are not as what we are; we are manifestations and expressions of that life beyond us as much as that within. There exists a…
Aspirational Creativity and Self-Improvement
There is no best, there is only better and it is a consequence of core psychological fallacies that we even assert or adhere to concepts and narratives of artistic, literary, ideological, political or existential completion and closure. It is always possible to creatively extend any system (or creative act of self-definition) by intuition and recursive…
Flying Kites
Returning to a particularly poorly-kept secret of our shared lives: no one actually knows what they are doing and everyone is improvising, making it up as they go along. We are born into a world of pre-existing stories, traditions and symbols which envelops us like a tidal wave and security blanket of meaning, identity and…
Meaning and Value: Displacing the Center
We believe that meanings and values are stored in things, in objects, places, people but this is not true. Meanings and values are stored as and in the distributed properties of complex, adaptive and interdependent fields and relationships of reference. The value of an artwork is not in the artwork itself, it is a property…
Random Facts: π and Six 9’s
A brief post on a mathematical curiosity. I was introduced to the concept of "six 9's" very recently. It is a definition of the (extreme) high availability of a system. This can be used to specify or demonstrate the required uptime and availability of, for instance, a computer server or related communications or information processing…
Social Reorganisation: Lessons from Physics and Nature
All ordered organisational systems are engaged in an endless competition with (and of) disorder and entropy; it is a race to weave order and patterned persistence from available resources while the other end of the tapestry continuously unravels into largely unrecoverable waste and loss. These organisational systems aspire to a relatively stable or constructively adaptive…
